When something goes wrong

“That video has no captions”

Video Brief reads captions; it does not listen to audio. If a video has none, there is nothing to summarize and no amount of retrying will change that. Music videos and small channels are the usual cases. Auto-generated captions count, so most talking-head videos work.

“That video is unavailable”

The video is private, deleted, age-restricted or region-locked. Check the link opens in a normal browser window while signed out of YouTube.

“New transcripts are paused”

YouTube asked us to slow down, so we stopped fetching for a while rather than push harder and make it worse. It clears on its own, and the message says roughly when. Videos summarized before are unaffected, so a link someone sent you still works.

“That is a lot of summaries at once”

Rate limiting. One summary occupies a single graphics card for about a minute, so there is a cap of eight per ten minutes. If you share an office or a household connection you may be sharing that allowance with someone else.

A summary is taking a long time

A minute is normal; the first one after a quiet period can take longer while the model warms up. Past about five minutes the job is given up on and reported as failed. Nothing is lost by trying again.

A shared link has stopped working

Shared links last 48 hours and then the brief is deleted. That is deliberate rather than a fault, and it is why the page shows a countdown. Summarize the video again to get a fresh link.

The summary is wrong

It happens. Summaries are produced by a language model working from captions, which are themselves imperfect. Every section keeps the timestamp it came from, so the fastest check is to press the timestamp and watch that moment. If a summary is badly wrong rather than merely rough, we would like to know which video.

A support address has not been published yet. If you are reading this and something is wrong, the person who invited you to Video Brief is the fastest route.